What is this in relation to? Source control? It's not standard terminology as far as I know but I might guess that a snapshot was used as a picture of a source tree at a point in time (probably for internal use), while a release is used for the code that is released externally.
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1800 INFORMATIONNov 9 '08 at 4:38

Sounds like you're asking about Maven (the build tool). Maybe you should include that in the question and the tags.
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bendinNov 9 '08 at 7:55

3 Answers
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These are specific, point-in-time releases. Released artifacts are considered to be solid, stable, and perpetual in order to guarantee that builds which depend upon them are repeatable over time. Released JAR artifacts are associated with PGP signatures and checksums verify both the authenticity and integrity of the binary software artifact. The Central Maven repository stores release artifacts.

Snapshot Artifacts

Snapshots capture a work in progress and are used during development. A Snapshot artifact has both a version number such as “1.3.0” or “1.3” and a timestamp. For example, a snapshot artifact for commons-lang 1.3.0 might have the name commons-lang-1.3.0-20090314.182342-1.jar.

Release repositories hold releases and Snapshot repositories hold snapshots. In maven a snapshot is defined as an artifact with a version ending in -SNAPSHOT. When deployed, the snapshot is turned into a timestamp. By definition, snapshots are mutable, releases are immutable. This is why Nexus makes you store them separately because usually you don't care if you lose snapshots, but you will care if you lose releases. It makes snapshot cleanup much easier to deal with that way.

1)snapshot builds:SNAPSHOT is the special version that indicate current deployment copy not like a regular version, maven checks the version for every build in the remote repository so the snapshot builds are nothing but maintainance builds.

2)Release builds:Release means removing the SNAPSHOT at the version for the build, these are the regular build versions.

so the snapshot artifacts and release artiifacts will be sent to snapshot,release repositories respectively.